Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story

Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story

It’s easy enough to prove that the external world exists. Doors,
rocks, other people, we keep running into them. But that’s not much of
a proof. It doesn’t show that any particular piece of the world exists
when we are not there to perceive it, and it doesn’t show why its
existence should matter. It’s just in the way. The proof helps us
still less with Stephen Hawking’s question, adduced on the first pages
of Jim Holt’s book: ‘Why does the universe go through all the bother
of existing?’ Mattering and bothering are important issues in Holt’s
quest, but they tend to be treated as entailments and sidebars,
marginalia to the big stuff: the ‘profound … mystery of being’, ‘the
deeper question’, ‘the deepest of all questions’, namely, ‘Why is
there something rather than nothing?’ Holt has a religious
temperament, if not a religion, and he thinks the notion of God is a
possible explanation of the mystery of being rather than the reverse
or the refusal of one. ‘Are we then doomed,’ he says, ‘to choose
between God and the deep brute Absurd?’ What if the one were the
polite, traditional form of the other? Buñuel said long ago that he
didn’t see why we should accept a mystery as the explanation of a
mystery. Holt will have none of this. He cites an anti-atheist review
of his own: ‘If there is an ultimate explanation for our contingent
and perishable world, it would seemingly have to appeal to something
that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might label “God”.’